Responding in a timely way to suicidal social media posts can save lives. Are the proper investments and training in place in 2015? An involved cop wants to further the dialogue! The balance between privacy and safety is often a challenge when talking about mental health issues. Social media adds another layer of complication for privacy advocates. Bottom line for Constable Scott Mills is that human resources, funding and training need to be invested in profession suicide intervention and prevention using social media tools and the dialogue needs to occur. Thanks Andrew for agreeing to let me do this blog post! This post will describe the community and Toronto Police response to a cry for help in social media, in particular on twitter. It is being written because 'we', the community and the police, as well as other stakeholders like paramedics and the health system, social services and the education system need to talk about it to ensure best practices moving forward. The permission to write these facts comes from a man named Andrew Parker himself. The permission was obtained on twitter in a public forum on the tweet embedded below on Monday March 23, 2015. [...]

Conf to Improve Interactions With Persons with Mental Illness - Downloadable Presentations #MHpolice http://t.co/rNVlsp66UR— CACP / ACCP (@CACP_ACCP) April 11, 2014 Toronto Street Nurse Anne Marie Batten presented her vision of Real Time Crisis Intervention at joint Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police & Mental Health Commission of Canada Mental Health conference at Fairmont Royal York Hotel, Toronto, Ontario Canada Real Time Crisis Intervention is a not for profit Canadian corporation with the goal of improving and saving lives using relationships and technology. "Listening More, Talking Less" Read what Real Time Crisis Intervention is in April/2014 RCMP Gazette. Special thank you to RCMP Ontario Social Media Specialist Jean Turner for making this article happen For a complete overview of what "Real Time Crisis Intervention" is "Listening More & Talking Less" please read April/2014 RCMP Gazette article written by Real Time Crisis founder, Toronto street nurse Anne Marie Batten by clicking here. For a few pics of the conference click here: Review presentation slides from the March/2014 conference here: Ricardo Araujo volunteers for Real Time Crisis intervention regularly monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram and any other social media platform that a crisis occurs in to [...]

Story appeared in Toronto Star Monday August 26, 2013 by reporter Liam Casey Thank you to Mark Horvath of InvisiblePeople.tv for inspiring this work. Toronto crisis team turns to social media to save lives. Real Time Crisis uses an innovative suicide intervention strategy — it goes directly, via social media, to people crying out for help. Photo For Online Story On #RealTimeCrisis @RealTimeCrisis Intervention To Save And Improve Lives In Toronto Star Monday August 26, 2013 Edition | photo by Rick Madodnik “Can I help?” Those three words can save lives. In fact, they are the very words that Anne Marie Batten — a Toronto street nurse involved in an innovative suicide intervention strategy — sends out over and over via Twitter as she talks down people in distress, some on the verge of taking their lives. For the past 18 months, Batten and Toronto police Const. Scott Mills have been working on a fledgling non-profit organization to help the mentally ill 24 hours a day on social media. They’ve dubbed it Real Time Crisis. “We’d rather not shoot somebody that’s in crisis,” said Mills. His employer, the Toronto police force, has come under intense scrutiny in recent [...]